Decoupling from skill rolls to make it a GM-facing luck roll seemed a fine way to do that.

(Which, let's be honest, is probably most of us.)Īvoiding superskills: I didn't want to have a single 'magic' skill that every player felt like they had to invest in just to use the superpowers at the heart of the game. It just gives the GM one more job, and disappoints players who actually like rolling funny-shaped dice, at least sometimes. Upon closer inspection, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. I thought putting the roll in the GM's hands might preserve that feeling. The roll itself: In 2400, the apex of ability is being so good you don't even have to roll. And there are already built-in methods for adjusting the odds on skill rolls, by letting you roll an extra help die, or hindering you by knocking down the skill die to a d4. Picking difficulty numbers was never supposed to be their job in this game. In 2400, the GM has a hard enough job, trying to think through logical and interesting risks and consequences rooted in the fiction. There was some wordy guidance to help GMs pick a die size, but that felt off even as I was writing it. The flaw in this reasoning, however, is that there's no guarantee GMs will use bigger dice.

The odds: Luck rolls with larger dice would give better odds than skill rolls with fairly low skills, encouraging players to use superpowers. Why the original approach, and why the update? Here are a few reasons that only really became clear after I started seeing how GMs (who aren't me) might approach it. This version reworks the exploit rules, and nearly doubles the number of exploits to choose from. In what may be my quickest turnaround from uploading a new game to uploading a new version, I've just posted a significant update to Codebreakers (just released late last night).

Codebreaker v11